Toyota's Comments on PHEVs at Air Resources Board Hearing
Oct 2, 2006 (From the CalCars-News archive)

Toyota's David Hermance concluded his presentation about the
company's position on electric vehicles and hybrids by speaking about
plug-in hybrids September 26 at the ARB ZEVTechnology Symposium.
(We'll have more comments on this as soon as the ARB puts up the
presentations from the event.)

Outside of the media relations department, Hermance has been Toyota's
leading spokesperson on PHEVs. He has been thinking about PHEVs for
years, and was involved in the early meetings of the Hybrid Vehicle
Working Group that led to the pioneering reports on PHEVs produced in
2001-2002 by a partnership between automakers, Department of Energy
National Labs, the Electric Power Research Institute and California
electric utilities (see <http://www.calcars.org/resources.html>.

Below is the full text of his two minutes on PHEVs (with indications
of _emphasis_), followed by his bio. As we've often noted, Toyota's
statements on PHEVs continue to evolve -- and not always in a
consistent direction, as you can see at the CalCars page, "How
Car-Makers are Responding to the Plug-In Hybrid Opportunity"
<http://www.calcars.org/carmakers.html>.

"Toyota Activities," September 26, 2006.

One last topic, plug-in hybrids. As a long-term vision, plug-in
hybrids are _really_ appealing in terms of energy diversity.
Depending upon the grid mix and the manufacturing efficiency of the
elements of the system, they may offer reduced lifecycle CO2 in
addition to reduced fuel consumption.

To reach the vision requires a breakthrough in battery technology
...for capacity, energy storage, durability and cost.

With today's best technologies, plug-ins are not _commercially_ viable.

At a DOE workshop in May, this is my summary; their summary is not
published yet; I welcome comments on my take from their meeting.

* The technical merit of plug-ins is reduced oil consumption and
transportation energy diversity.
* Batteries are the key issue.
* Reduced fuel consumption trumps all-electric range. If you require
a vehicle to have all-electric range, it requires a different design
and will delay the introduction, mitigating the potential benefit.
* And V2G [Vehicle to Grid], while it's an interesting concept and a
future possibility, is not ready for prime-time at this point in time.

We support those conclusions.
Just one more slide, I'm almost done, I promise.

It requires much more battery on board, a minimum of four times the
battery and sometimes as much as eight or 10 times, depending on how
much you're trying to do. That has mass, volume and cost impact.

The energy storage system,, the battery becomes much more like a
consumer electronic product than today's hybrids, so the duty cycle
is much more severe for the battery. A battery that lives well in
today's hybrid application will not _necessarily_ live well in this
application. Typically, the range of state of charge is 100% to about
20%, which is much more stressful to the battery, and durability
becomes a real issue, and if you don't have a life-of-vehicle
battery, that has major implications on lifecycle cost of the vehicle
technology. And that's it.

Here's his biography from the ARB event:
David W. Hermance is Executive Engineer for Advanced Technology
Vehicles at Toyota Technical Center (TTC), located in Gardena,
California. TTC, Toyota's North American R&D center, is a division of
Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing, North America, Inc. (TEMA).
Mr. Hermance is responsible for advanced technology vehicle
communication for the North American market and advanced technology
vehicle emission regulatory activities in California.